Parameters and Universals (review)

This is a collection of essays on microcomparative syntax previously published by Richard S. Kayne between 1985 and 1999. The fifteen essays, which emphasize the idea that the study of syntactic parameters goes hand in hand with the study of syntactic universals, deal with issues of comparative syntax, defined by K as ‘that facet of syntactic theory concerned with the question of how best to characterize the properties of human languages that are not universal’ (3).

The nature and the roles of parameters and universals are presented in the first chapter of this authoritative volume in a manner consistent with modern linguistic theories. The introductory remarks on the microparametric syntax, written in 1996 but still valid today, are intended as a preliminary overview of the importance of comparative syntax for modern linguistics and as an indirect description of the way in which this framework should be approached in order to improve the perception of syntactic variation processes.

Dedicated to Nicholas Ruwet, this influential volume is thematically structured in three parts which reflect the evolution of K’s position on comparative syntax over the past fifteen years or so. The first and largest part contains nine essays on Romance languages and studies such phenomena as past participal agreement, clitic climbing and other related problems (null subjects, control, and infinitive-clitic order), auxiliary selection (in a modular approach), pronominal decomposition (with special reference to the French soi and the Italian sé), and French clitic doubling. Part 2 focuses on English, with particular attention to some nonstandard varieties. The three essays making up this part deal with aspects of agreement (such as verb agreement with a wh-phrase, successive cyclicity, contraction, and zero suffixes) and with the complementizer of, which is shown to be very similar to the infinitival to in some English varieties. K’s approach to this latter issue includes reference to French, Italian, and Scandinavian syntax. The three chapters in Part 3 take into consideration Universal Grammar issues such as the status of covert (LF) movement (both of the ‘negative phrase movement’ type and of the VP/AspP/TP movement type), analysis of prepositional complementizers de (French) and di (Italian) as attractors, and word order universals of the Greenbergian type.

This book presents an excellent opportunity both for scholars and students to have several of K’s major papers in a single volume that provides a comprehensive and cohesive view of present-day comparative syntax. This thorough investigation of syntactic parameters and universals represents a constant challenge to explore the principles of Universal Grammar and their interaction with language-specific parameters. In addition to the meticulous analyses in this book, the reader should be able to perceive K’s message: that a lot remains to be done in the field of syntactic variation and that microparametric syntax is a powerful tool which needs to be developed in the study of both Universal Grammar and syntactic variation.